Last July, a post about a "problematic" new book came up on my Tumblr dashboard. I only paid it minimal attention – I had Avengers gifs to look at, after all – but then someone else posted about it, and then another, and then another. I began to pay more attention to it.

Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls is the first in a trilogy of self-published young adult novels by Victoria Foyt, in which the world as we know has drastically changed: "the Heat", a mysterious global happening, has wiped out most white people (the "Pearls" of the title). Darker-skinned people have survived this disaster thanks to their skin's melanin; they're called "Coals".

Book one follows a young Pearl, Eden, who "loathes her white skin and accepts the oppressive opinion that it is ugly, even worthless". She wears a "special dark coating in order to protect it from the Heat". In an added twist, Eden must find a mate by the time she is 18, or else she will be killed. In book two, we learn that Eden's father works in a laboratory owned by a Coal (Bramford, who Eden falls in love with), where he develops the technology to enable mankind to overcome the Heat. The "technology" is essentially a human-animal hybrid, and Bramford becomes the first "man-beast" after trialling this new technology. There's also some other stuff about a terrorist Coal group, a community of near-naked rainforest-dwellers with a prophecy and some mild bestiality, too – and this is just Book One. Hoyt has also created an accompanying website to promote the book, with individual bio pages to flesh out her characters' back stories. One young Coal named Jamal (sigh) notes his bucket list thusly: "mate, turn 24, buy a new gun, become president of the FFP, destroy all Pearls".

It's a lot to take in.

Foyt is hardly the first writer to use the trope of a dystopian world in young adult fiction (The Hunger Games is still doing brisk business) and for that matter, she is not even the first to do it with a twist on race: Malorie Blackman's largely excellent Noughts & Crosses series does this, so we know it is possible to write a nuanced and smart book on such a foundation. I have read Foyt's book, and aside from the astonishingly bad prose, the thing that leaps out at you is the absence of self-awareness or acknowledgement of privilege. Foyt has gone for broad brushstrokes in her fictional world: from the names she's given her characters' "races": Coals and Pearls (oh, come on!) to the cure for all this racial strife: the creation of a black "beast man" (!), to the "special dark coating" – blackface by any other name – to the jungle-dwelling "primitive" tribespeople, she's gone about it all wrong. The book is littered with several "uh, what?" moments, as Foyt betrays her own personal biases. When the book's very premise is so steeped in privilege, it is impossible for it not to be offensive.

Commentator Jay Smooth has a video called "How To Tell People They Sound Racist". In it, he talks about the "what they did" versus the "what they are" conversation. It's about separating intention from action. Foyt's stated intent was to portray the horrors of racism. There is nothing wrong with her intention, but there are huge issues with her execution. When you write about a fictional oppressed race of white people from the position of your present-day white privilege and do not acknowledge it, the results are messy. And that's what Revealing Eden is: incredibly messy. More importantly, when you receive notice from hundreds of people of colour saying so, you do not release a statement telling them they are wrong ("how can you critique or damn a book if you haven't read it?" she wrote. "This kind of blind attack is exactly what creates racism. This book is meant to provoke the white community that has never experienced racism or been oppressed because they have been in the majority in this country"), you listen, identify and acknowledge your mistakes – and do better next time. Most recently, the makers of the Twilight movies made sure to cast Native American actors in the roles of the Quileute Indian wolf pack, a deliberate move which avoided the whitewashing to which Hollywood often resorts.

"What does the lack of any racial outrage or puzzlement or fervor amidst the tremendous rain of positive reviews possibly say? Conceivably, if the book had not reached the African-American community of readers, if such a category still exists, perhaps there might be some backlash. The first young African-American reader who responded to me loved the book. But then, she's the kind of free spirit who would eschew limiting herself to a single category."

Her comments remind me of Baratunde Thurston's assertion in his book, How to Be Black, that all white people need a "Good Black Friend" to help them through potentially problematic racial situations. Thanks to the internet, Foyt just acquired a few hundred Good Black Friends. It'd be nice if she would listen to them.